Paper summary - Systemic Creative Problem-Solving: On the Poverty of Ideas and the Generative Power of Prototyping, by Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

What I read

In this text, Vallée-Tourangeau describes a way of thinking about creativity that focuses on the relationship between a creator and iterations of what they are making; he then illustrates a way to conduct empirical research to focus on this use of in-context prototyping, rather than focusing on cognition of the problem solver.

First, Vallée-Tourangeau describes a unique quality he has noticed in artists—that they are drawn to materials and tools in a way that he is not. For artists, making is a “co-production” between themselves and the output, and also the materials and tools and application methods that live between those two parts of creativity. Artists speak of a personified relationship that they have with the other elements, as if those other elements are participating in the art-making process. As he describes, the “agency of the materials” is effaced when we observe a finished painting, but if we observe art in production, it’s clear.

Next, he describes one of his motivations for the text—the explanation of a new study that assessed creativity in a large sample (690,000) of students. The test followed similar approaches to cognitive-based knowledge-seeking of creativity: students were prompted to make things in a way that encouraged divergent thinking, and to evaluate those ideas in a more purposeful way. He indicates several challenges he sees in the work. He indicates that the report defines creative thinking as “the competence to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge and impactful expressions of imagination.” This focuses, at least in part, on the solution—the “diffused” part of the creation, much like the art hanging on the wall described above. He also indicates that the definition includes a reference to concrete translations of idea, but the whole of the definition points to the diffusion model.

Vallée-Tourangeau describes the difference: that a translation model views the output of a creative act as a part of the creative process, and that once an object exists, it is “interrogated, and the way it looks or behaves seeds new questions and exposes new uncertainties.” The creative output is a result of the process, not the cognitive input.

He also offers a critique of the “big and little creativity,” one that describes little creativity as everyday problem solving, and big creativity as one that is “steeped in exceptionalism,” as if those who can do it have a unique superpower. While little creativity is easier to measure, studies like the one Vallée-Tourangeau is responding to are motivated by a “quest” for that exceptionalism. The proposal and distinction of the big and little creativity is problematic in itself, in that it invites an explanation based on cognition; Vallée-Tourangeau feels that “Before embarking on a quest—a quixotic one, I might add—for gigantic differences in cognitive processes, we should seek to describe more mundane and materially anchored processes that ratchet otherwise unexceptional abilities to produce exceptional epistemological outputs.” He explains that a goal of our research should be to eliminate this form of distinction between big and small.

In the next section, Vallée-Tourangeau starts by describing the stated value of prototyping, historically, that is found in creators like Michelangelo, Henry Ford, and James Dyson. He references Camburn, who identifies the key aspects of prototyping—exploration, active learning, refinement, and communication, and indicates that a prototype allows you to “converse with them and have them tell you what makes your idea wrong.” He references Apple as taking the same approach in developing the iPhone’s keyboard, and describes that prototypes are about translation and transformation of ideas, and they describe the next transformation. They act, in the same way that a painter’s paint or canvas or tools act (they are “actants” or “partners in thinking.”)

Vallée-Tourangeau describes how prototyping changes the set way of thinking about creativity, one that starts with an idea and is then shaped over time. This highlights the problem with standardized testing and with most creativity research, which focuses on idea generation and idea selection as cognitive processes. This is a “cognitivist” approach, which Vallée-Tourangeau again describes as “steeped” in individualism, and continues to exclude the other actors involved in a creative process—not other people, but the material, tools, and so-on, and to exclude the idea that the thing that is made is a prompt to make more things. In this model, “people have agency and intentionality, objects have neither.”

Next, Vallée-Tourangeau shows how this form of translation model (rather than diffusion model) can be studied empirically. This approach uses epoché (suspension of judgment or belief, often described as "bracketing" or "withholding assent") and horizontalization (the equal weighting of a participant’s statement uttered to describe their experience).

Vallée-Tourangeau describes common forms of tests used in creativity research, that often show up as brain teasers, where the initial response is not the “correct” response; he offers several examples of these experiments, and describes that they often result in a debate between two groups of researchers: “those who support the so-called business-as-usual view of insight problem-solving and those who support the so-called special (as in ‘non-routine’) processes view.” But both groups ignore the iterative nature of the work with materiality and prototyping. A way of measuring this requires providing participants a set of materials in a mutable format (such as a physical set of objects), and then capturing their actions, their words, and the things that change in the physical objects (the prototype.)

This format of study allows a researcher to see, track, and understand the timing of the formation of a solution and the structure of the prototype at that time. It can measure two types of outsight. One is post hoc, where playful exploration leads to a result, and participants are surprised to see they have succeeded. The other is enacted, where the solution is articulated, but not understood until the physical movement has started.

Vallée-Tourangeau concludes the text by describing a “double process of becoming”—the “co-evolution and co-determination of ideation and physical prototyping.” The final solution prototype is not the important part; the interim prototypes are what is important for understanding creativity. As he examples,

“An interactive problem-solving procedure reveals the systemic character of creative cognition, restores the role of objects in thinking, and problematises in a productive manner their agentic properties. Efforts to understand creative problem-solving are on a much richer and surer footing with interactivity”

What I learned and what I think

This article is the first that captures much of what I think and feel about creativity, and what I think and feel has been bothering me when I read the various papers and studies that emphasize pragmatism and a focus on innovation, as captured in output, and that equate creativity to lateral-thinking and innovation.

One of the primary foundational assumptions of Vallée-Tourangeau’s discussion here is that creativity is a process, not an output. With that simple change, the whole course of creativity research and study is shifted. Now, we don’t (shouldn’t, can’t) use input/output as a way of assessing if someone “is creative,” or speed as measure of creativity, or “number of tries” as a way of thinking about success. Success, in this way of thinking, isn’t the output being “right” because the output doesn’t matter. Instead, the steps along the way can be more “right” in relationship to how they build on the previous, and the steps alone aren’t the measure, but rather the back-and-forth between the thing that is made and the person who made it and the next thing that is made.

This way of thinking or framing doesn’t abdicate the idea that there are good and bad creative outputs, or somehow democratize all work as good and without critique. It makes no claim about the quality of the work, which then becomes a space for a different kind of inquiry or assessment (form, function, aesthetic style, appropriateness, provocation, communication, relevance, and the established space of art and design history and criticism.) And it doesn’t give up on the idea of assessing how creative an action is, because “not using prototyping” is “worse” than “using prototyping,” at least generally.

A result of the focus on verb rather than noun also describes why these silly lateral thinking exercises rub me the wrong way: they really measure nothing, or at the very least, they measure how well someone is at the exercise—which has little or no grounding in how creativity is actually performed (at least in my context of professional design work.) We teach lateral thinking as a parallel on top of making things, a skill to be learned along with drawing or researching or synthesizing. Creativity is not a contest, and thinking in unpredictable ways isn’t some sort of prize.

The use of the word prototype here is problematic a little, because it doesn’t mean the same thing to Vallée-Tourangeau as it has started to mean in the world of design. A prototype has somehow become a delineation point for being done, or presenting, or user testing, and Vallée-Tourangeau means it as a point of making on the way to those end points. It’s the thing in between making another thing, during a focused part of making. I’m not sure it actually has a name, particularly because when craft is good and use of tool has become innate-ish, it exists continually and forever until it’s done. There are stopping points that aren’t endpoints, the sitting back, looking into the distance, turning off perception, letting the synthesis happen, and those are longer and perhaps indicate the point of prototype existence in the way Vallée-Tourangeau means. Although maybe I’m wrong about the intent, because the reference to Dyson’s thousands of prototypes (an inflated myth? I wasn’t expecting that kind of pedestrianism in here) is really talking about a comparison of end point (each iteration was ended long enough to have a critique about it, or at least to swap out the pink foam or whatever for another piece.)

On exceptionalism: I was with him on much of that, not because I think we shouldn’t reward exceptionalism, but because I think exceptionalism happens through hard work (and we should reward the work first and the person second, but the output third or not at all—wow, look, another iphone.) But I don’t understand why Dyson, and Ford, Michelangelo and Apple suddenly popped up in the middle of the text. Those are actual examples of what the tests at the beginning are trying to look for—where is Michelangelo, or what are the qualities we are teaching the Michelangelos—and what he disagreed with (and so do I.) I think they may have been attempts to somehow make the article more accessible. I don’t think it was necessary.

I’m not tracking the real difference in research approach that he’s proposing. It seems that the shift is on the measurement, not the test or subject matter—that we should be studying not the output or number of tries or speed, but instead, the moments of interactivity between the person and the material being used. Or, it could be using material at all, that can be manipulated, rather than simply saying the problem and forcing the participant to hold it in their head. A big question mark here, though. Vallée-Tourangeau is still using “solve a brain teaser” as his example of identifying creativity,” which is still measuring or attempting to measure the ability to look beyond an obvious solution and find an innovative one. Creativity isn’t finding innovation. It’s not building innovation. And it’s not always or even frequently about solving problems. Vallée-Tourangeau makes the case himself. I think he’s still a foot in the echo-chamber of cognitive research on creativity. To study it, even empirically, means to get out of those mindsets too. Creativity a s process and conversation with material are two fundamental shifts that he drives. Other shifts have to include creativity is making things and creativity is craftmanship and workmanship.

Thank you to Marutzu Shigoto for sending me this article.